It’s kind of charming to me that after 50 damn years of filmmaking, it’s still a coin-flip whether a Ridley Scott movie is going to be good or not. Sir Ridley’s not like Steven Spielberg, who mostly keeps knocking them out of the park; nor Cameron Crowe, who released “Almost Famous” and then forgot how moviemaking works. He tiptoes down the middle, daring you to believe in him with an “American Gangster” and then pooping out a “Robin Hood.”
So you’d be forgiven for thinking a lega-sequel to his 2000 blockbuster “Gladiator” would fall on the poop side of the line. It seems like nobody outside of the Hollywood bean-counting office was asking for this. But he’s done it, folks; he’s managed to make a big dumb watchable action movie!
The film stars Oscar/Emmy/BAFTA-nominated Paul Mescal, and a perk of not being an actual film critic is that I can freely admit having no familiarity with him before this.1 He seems to be at exactly the career stage Russell Crowe was in 2000, when the film geeks were giddy to see an up-and-coming actor explode onto the A-list with his sword and sandals and oaths of vengeance. Mescal is a darn good actor, although genre work can be a different beast—I’m not sure Brad Pitt pulled off “Troy,” for example. But Mescal pulls this one off, giving the same effortful gravitas that Crowe did a generation ago.
As you’d expect the movie opens with an epic battle, Hanno (Mescal) defending his city against an attack by Roman general Acacius (Pedro Pascal; try not to mix them up). Hanno’s beloved wife takes an arrow to the chest—specifically ordered by Acacius, like “hey kill that woman in particular”—which fuels the movie’s vengeance plotline, even though the wife is hardly mentioned again.
From there, the script hits the story beats of “Gladiator I” like it’s filling out a Hallmark-Christmas-movie template, including the abduction into slavery and the sea voyage to a farm-league gladiator arena where our hero meets his mentor. That would be Denzel Washington, bejeweled and beaming as the slave-turned-slaver Macrinus.
Ohh man, this performance. I’d heard comments that Denzel felt like he was acting in a different movie. Not sure I agree, but he’s definitely committing to the bit, hamming it up like it’s his birthday at the karaoke bar. I thought to myself that he was charisma-ing more than acting, which is not a criticism—at one point Macrinus wears a fucking GOLDEN CAPE, what do you want from him?!
After some obligatory NXT-level gladiator fights, including against unconvincing CGI baboons, Macrinus decides his bright young pupil is ready for the big leagues and takes them both to Rome to shoot for fame and rub elbows with the mad twin emperors.
The late Roman Empire’s parallels to present-day America—decadent, stratified, distracted by bloodsport and abstract notions of glory, with a mad leader naming a literal monkey as his consul—seemed sharper than in the original. Or maybe just more noticeable, since I’m 24 years older and wiser. I definitely felt a wistful pang when a character reminded us of Marcus Aurelius’s quote…
There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it; any more than a whisper and it would vanish.
…and called it an old man’s fantasy. Sigh.
Anyway! Hanno arrives in Rome and quickly encounters Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, the only returning lead from “Gladiator”2), who puts the pieces together to reveal… Hanno is Lucius, her son with Maximus! Hanno would rather chew glass than admit to his true identity, and it’s all a bit awkward, since (a) Lucilla is married to Acacius; (b) the couple is leading a plot to overthrow those mad emperors; (c) Macrinus is leveraging the chaos to swivel himself into power. Will Hanno get caught up in the palace intrigue? Reader, he will.
Thankfully there’s still time for gladiator fights in the gladiator movie. Hanno/Lucius arrives at the Colosseum and becomes a star by going mano-a-rhino, then later returns to captain a boat in a staged naval battle. It’s an amusing combination of the preposterous (Sharks, seriously?) and the historical (Naval battles, seriously!). Ridley Scott is a good action director, but I dare say not a great one; his editing and shot selection are certainly a cut above Michael Bay, but well short of James Cameron.
(A minor note, but what a relief to see action stars who are normally muscular, with unshaved chests and—one hopes—minimal steroids in their systems.)
It runs too long, as all Hollywood movies must. What seems like the climactic battle occurs about 30 minutes before the actual climactic battle, which isn’t the climactic battle either. There are occasional flashbacks to the “Gladiator 1” timeline which use the exact same desaturated effect as the flashbacks on “Love is Blind.” And just as two Roman armies seem about to come to blows—a fourth climactic battle!—Hanno/Lucius de-escalates the situation with a very silly “let’s all get along” speech, and… I dunno, everybody goes home I guess? Hanno/Lucius doesn’t even think about his wife. This movie didn’t seem to have any idea how to end.
In case I’m slinging too many arrows, I’ll repeat that I liked it. The production design and special effects (baboons aside) are spectacular. Much of the acting is top-notch; in particular I was drawn to Joseph Quinn’s performance as one of the twin emperors, dancing on the edge of sanity. There’s a huge improvement over the original in racial and LGBT representation, and no improvement at all in female agency: despite being the sequel’s only returning star, Connie Nielsen finds herself literally chained up like a damsel not once, but twice!
That’s blockbusters for ya. It was a capably-built dumb movie that did an acceptably bare minimum at advancing the art form and provoking some thoughts. Denzel’s grin and golden cape might be worth the ticket price alone. Now that Paul Mescal has pulled off a historical epic, he’ll be announced as an MCU superhero within the fortnight.